Oliver Wendell Holmes Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous
old oliver wendell holmes quotes, oliver wendell holmes sayings, and oliver wendell holmes proverbs, collected over the years from a variety
of sources.

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A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men ? from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb'd in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Science is the topography of ignorance.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, One Nation evermore!

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, One Nation evermore!

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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A man's mind stretched by a new idea, can never go back to its original dimensions.